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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Hey, you know what would be awesome? Being able to magnetize my kid and stick him to the fridge so he couldn't get into shenanigans while I was doing the dishes. What's that? You're calling child services? Oh. Did I say awesome? I meant awful. bad. terrible.

Le sigh.

Turns out there's only one socially acceptable way to stick your progeny to the fridge. Like ziz...

This is part of the magnetic, dress up-able bear set that I made Teddy's grammie for Christmas.

This isn't a tutorial exactly, on account of how I use Photoshop like a chimp trying to tie a bowtie; you know, with honking rage and tears of frustration.

But what I did was take a picture of the shortpants there against a lightish backdrop. Then I meddled with it a bit in Picnik (so much less scary that Photoshop, and free!).

Then I used photoshop to cut and paste it onto a white background and go around the edges of my bear in white. I used a biggish brush with a blurry edge.

I took pictures of some of the bear's favorite things, like Mr. T-bone Walker up there (you can call him T-Bone, he's cool like that) and a few different hats, his bear ears, fire chief and yellow hard hat. I also scavenged a flower and a balloon offa the internets.

I outlined them in photoshop too then I resized them and moved them all onto the image of the bear, so I could make sure they fit him like. Here's where most of the honking howls of frustration came in.

Next I used Picnik to make a word -bubble that says "HI!" and a heart with "I Love Grammie" in it.

I saved my files as jpgs then printed those suckers down at the drugstore. You could use your own printer but mine is LOUSY and for 19c a pop you can't really go wrong.

Once I had them printed I cut my images out then stuck them on sticky magnetic sheets, trimmed the magnetic backing and voila, fridge-ready.

Presentation wise, I stuck them on a bit of card with some rolled up tape and popped them in an envelope.

I might ALSO have made my guy chums some Vargas Girl pin up magnets for their fridges using the same technique. And that might have looked like this... (Look away now if you're offended by scantily clad women or copyright infringement)

But I'm not admitting to anything on account of how those images do have copyrights and googling "Vargas Girls" will show you some genuinely nasty things and may acquire you a virus so bad that it decimates your computer and makes you cry like a baby at the thought of losing every single picture you have. Or, ahem, so I've heard.